Severed Steel first playthrough part 4: Campaign +, Map Editor, and more Firefight
0For our last Severed Steel play session, we check out the New Game + mode that unlocked after beating the original campaign, briefly poke around with the beta map editor, and finish what we started last weekend in Firefight.
New Game + adds more enemies, including respawning enemies, which sounds a bit like nightmare difficulty in OG Doom, but is probably more manageable on average. It certainly does turn up the pressure, though, and remembering what you need to do in each level to get through as quickly as possible certainly helps. I was wondering how much trouble this mode would give me, but I had no problem making significantly shorter work of it than my first campaign playthrough. The same difficulty settings are available within New Game + as in the original campaign, so you still have some control over the difficulty.
Since I ended up with time to spare, I took a brief look at the map editor. Having never mapped for a voxel-based game (and pretty much any truly 3D game for that matter), there's definitely a learning curve to figure out how to expediently build and carve out rooms. It seemed like even constructing doorways was a lot of work (I hope I was missing something), and I ran into quite a few glitches when trying to place entities... and eventually crashed the entire game, while forgetting to save, so that kind of cut that experience short (perhaps mercifully). The editor includes Steam Workshop support, but I wasn't able to get subscribed workshop content to show up in the game's level/campaign menu for some reason... but I'm not sure if that's a Severed Steel problem or a Steam Workshop problem, as I've always found the latter's UX to be nebulous.
Still having time left to play with, I decided to spend the rest of the night finishing what I started in Firefight mode to unlock all of the levels.
Overall, if you find Severed Steel's gameplay mechanics enjoyable and don't mind replaying levels in different modes or with different modifiers, you can get plenty of play time out of it. It's true that the base campaign will only last you a few hours and then you will have already seen all of the included maps. Hopefully the editor becomes more stable and helps to change that, though I'm not sure how much development time is being spent on that when Echo Point Nova is also now actively in development (which I'm also looking forward to).
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